Lions, Leopards and Legitimacy

Concerning these leopards, I have heard many slanders in my days whispered in the silence of night, with that most illustrious prince Henry V, in his sieges, so even with my especial lord, Thomas Montacute, Earl of Salisbury and Perticus[?], in divers of his sieges, and with Margaret, mother of Henry V, so that regarding the truth of this matter I truly can call myself an expert.  You should say, therefore, if it please you, that our supreme lord, Henry, King of England, bears for the kingdom of England, three lions Or in a field Gules, as his forebear Henry II bore.

In all late-mediaeval heraldic treatises, colours and charges are ascribed symbolic meaning, such that those granting (or even assuming) arms should consider carefully the aptness of a coat of arms for its recipient.  Nicholas Upton, as is well known, was certainly assiduous when granting arms, and discusses in detail the symbolism of heraldry in his De Studio Militari.[1]  The author of the roughly contemporary Welsh treatise, Llyfr Arfau, says that charges were assigned to people according to their character; if their character was not known, then they would be given inanimate charges such as the chevron or cross.[2]

One of Upton’s concerns was the creatures on the arms of England:  what they were and what they symbolised.  Indeed, he (and his copyists after him) gives a considerable portion of his fourth book to the matter.  Evan Jones noted that in one copy of Upton, ‘the lion and the leopard are taken out of the alphabetically arranged list of animals, and the inclusion of the arms of the kings of Britain between the description of the lion and leopard is strange, since the reader has not yet been initiated into the secret of describing arms.’[3]  In the Baddesworth version, each charge is followed by who bears it, fitting in the question of the English royal arms more logically.  After the section in Baddesworth on Arma regum Brittanie comes one entitled Quod Ricardus secundus leones non leopardos portavit.

The French, exemplified by Honoré Bouet’s most excellent book, The Tree of Battles (written c.1387), held that the English arms were Gules three leopards passant guardant Or; Upton, on the other hand, held that the arms were Gules three lions passant guardant Or.  In French heraldry, a lion passant was a leopard.[4]  If that was the case, why, then, was Upton so unwilling to dismiss the difference as merely a discrepancy in terminology, and so keen to prove that the creatures on his sovereigns shield are lions?  The answer lies in the symbolism of these animals.

The lion was the king of beasts, and represented bravery, ferocity, power, gentility and largesse; it was also connected with Judah and Christ.[5]  The leopard, however, signified that – as one of Upton’s source-books put it –

"the first to bear it…was born out of wedlock, and was the son of another man’s wife…these animals, and those which are begotten of beasts of unlike natures and species, have genital organs without the power to use them."[6]  

With taints of bastardy and impotence to its character, the leopard was an unfortunate charge even to inherit:  it may have been an entirely appropriate charge for William the Conqueror to bear, but it was not for his legitimately-born descendants – especially those trying to claim the throne of France by blood.  (The pard, the leopard’s sire, was another animal not fit for a king to be associated with, for it ‘signifies that the first to assume it was not free born, and thus it is said, “However far the apple is taken from the orchard, its taste and its appearance will indicate the kind of tree on which it grew”’; it also signified the Anti-Christ.)[7]

Upton, who accompanied the Earl of Salisbury to France, clearly felt it his duty to prove the ‘leoninity’ of the English arms and refute any hint of illegitimacy.[8]  He acknowledges that Henry V had the right to bear leopards, representing Duke William the Bastard of Normandy, but states clearly that he bears three lions Or on a field Gules for the kingdom of England, as borne by his forebear – through the male line – Henry II.[9]  He does, however, proceed to say, somewhat contradictorily, that Henry II’s beasts could be interpreted as three leopards, two being the Norman arms and one the arms of Aquitaine, though he himself does not appear convinced.  Apart from the leopard issue, bearing the arms of the Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine would remind people of the French king’s superiority, an issue of great importance during the Hundred Years War.[10]  The quotation at the beginning gives the impression that Upton discussed the matter with, or, at least, heard the discussions of, the Earl of Salisbury and Henry V while on campaign.  This suggests that the matter was of some importance at the time.  The debate occurs in Strangways’ Book, compiled just after De Studio Militari, in much the same form (with discourse on lions, leopards, and the arms of various English kings), and since this was written at the inns of court, it might be that it was a topic for discussion amongst lawyers of Henry VI’s reign.[11]

The phrase ‘quod Ricardus secundus leones non leopardos portavit’ suggests that Upton was not the first to address the issue, and that the question did not arise merely in Henry V’s reign.  There are two earlier references than Upton to the lion-leopard issue, and they are in the Tractatus de Armis by Johannes de Bado Aureo and the Llyfr Arfau by Siôn Trevor, both probably composed by 1394.[12]  Only the 1449 copy of de Bado Aureo refers to the lion-leopard question, doing so in almost the same words (albeit in a different language) as the Llyfr Arfau.  They say that Bouet affirms (Tree of Battles, cap. cxxxix) that the king of England bears in his arms leopards and not lions, and that this is obviously an error.  The Latin text goes on to say that one Johannes de Hanvilla wrote in his book called the Architrenium that Brutus, who was the first king of England bore a lion passant Gules in a field Or.  Llyfr Arfau does not mention this, and I have no idea what this book is, or who John de Hanville is.  Returning to the arms of the kings of Britain, although William the Conqueror bore Gules two leopards Or, his great-grandson Henry II bore Gules three lions passant Or, and it is from him, rather than William, that the English kings get their arms.[13]  This, of course, is just what Upton says.

If the question arose in Richard II’s time, did it before?  A recent article on Edward III suggests that the leopard bore no such contentions for him.  Edward turned up to a joust in 1334 disguised as one M. Lyonel, the name given also to one of his sons.  In a poem celebrating the battle of Neville’s Cross (1346), ‘leopard’ is interchangeable with ‘lion’.  However, in other poems, on Henry III and Edward I, leopards were used less innocently.[14]

Forrester, writing on the lion-leopard issue, talked of ‘a sly conspiracy’ by French heralds to denigrate England’s monarchs by ‘inducing them to accept arms with secret heraldic allusions’.  This is possibly a little far-fetched – how does he suggest that the French managed to induce the English to choose the arms they did? – and he himself admits problems with it, notably a collusionary position of the English heralds.[15]  He is right to point out the ‘secret heraldic allusions’ (i.e. bastardy and moral corruption), but these allusions were not apparent when King John adopted the lions (leopards?) in the thirteenth century.

Instead, it seems to me, these allusions were used by the French in response to the claim by the English to the French throne, and then not only until Richard II’s reign.  Edward III used leopards with impunity – no-one was likely to challenge his legitimacy.  It is when the French recover from the English onslaught of the mid-fourteenth century that the question arises of the moral fibre of England’s kings.  Bouet’s treatise is from this period.  The chapter of the Hundred Years War which covers the 1390s is not all that clear; was this debate something to do with the continuance or not of war under Richard II?[16]  Was there some insinuation on the part of the French?  We know that Richard was interested in armorial display – from him is the earliest English royal grant of arms,[17] and for him was painted the gorgeous Wilton Diptych, brimming with badges. The debate continued into Henry V’s reign, perhaps heightened by the sensitivity of the Lancastrian kings over their claim to the throne.  In any case, it is a good reminder that the political significance of armory should never be overlooked.

Katie Hawks

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Bibliography

Bysshe, E. E. (ed.), Nicholai Uptoni, De Studio Militari (London, 1654)

Coopland, G. W. (ed. & trans.), The Tree of Battles of Honoré Bonet (Liverpool, 1949).

Curry, A., The Hundred Years War (London, 1993)

Dennys, R., The Heraldic Imagination (London, 1975)

Forrester, C. D. I. G., ‘The Heraldic Leopard as a Punning Insult’, Coat of Arms n.s.9.160 (1992), pp.326-8

Fox-Davies, A. C., A Complete Guide to Heraldry (London, 1925)

Humphery-Smith, C., ‘Why Three Leopards?’, Coat of Arms n.s.5.126 (1983), pp.153-6

Jones, E. (ed. & trans.), Medieval Heraldry (Cardiff, 1943)

London, H. S., ‘Some Medieval Treatises on English Heraldry’, Antiquaries’ Journal xxxiii (1953)

Pastoureau, M., Héraldique Médiévale (Paris, 1983)

Shenton, C., ‘Edward III and the Symbol of the Leopard’, in M. Keen and P. Coss (eds.), Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display (Woodbridge, 2002), pp.69-81

Wagner, A. R., Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages (2^nd edn., Oxford, 1960)

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